


Procedure

by Ice_the_Irken



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Blood, Gen, I take liberties with Todd’s backstory, I take my sweet time torturing Todd, I tried to be medically accurate but I am not a doctor, Live Experimentation, Medical Experimentation, Medical Torture, Seriously. Todd is NOT having a good time, Suicidal Thoughts, Vivisection, You can’t tell me starving him is the only thing the Genii did to him in that prison, death mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-19 03:15:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29868324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ice_the_Irken/pseuds/Ice_the_Irken
Summary: It seems pretty odd that the Genii was in possession of a live Wraith, the species which has tormented the humans of the Pegasus Galaxy for several millenia, and only used them to torture their enemies.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 10





	Procedure

The Wraith kept telling himself several things. He kept telling himself that he would survive, like he’s told himself since the day he came in here. He kept telling himself that he was not afraid of pain; pain was just the body’s natural response to damage, an alarm system to make sure that a creature would attempt to get away from whatever, or cease whatever action caused the pain.

Right now, those instincts to get away from whatever caused pain were overpowering the Wraith’s attempts at rationality. He tried to move, but his efforts were useless against the restraints holding him down against the table. His heart-rate quickened, pounding so hard he could hear it in his head, like someone rapidly pounding against a door, desperate to get out, to escape, like he was so desperate to do now.

A blinding light focused straight over the Wraith was suddenly turned on, causing him to squint. It was painful until his pupils shrunk and adjusted, and still was even then if he looked directly at it. A human became visible over him again as his eyes adjusted. He tried to move again, straining hard against the restraints to no avail, and his heart pounded in his chest so hard he could feel it in his throat, as he knew the true procedure was about to begin as more humans came into view, some wearing white, others wearing those dark grey uniforms with the rust-colored edges, both of which he associated with pain and torture.

The scientists and ‘doctors’ wanted to ‘study’ the Wraith, to learn all they could about his biology, whether it be purely out of curiosity or out of the desire to learn how to harm the Wraith as efficiently as possible. He didn’t want to harm his own species, to be the source of the knowledge that would lead to the death and/or torture of his brothers, but no amount of screaming and pleading would convince them to cease their torture; they just ignored him like the _soulless monsters_ they are.

This was their most torturous way of studying him; they cut him open and studied his insides. They cut and dug into him, seeing what was inside. They ripped pieces of his insides out, taking them away to be studied, then just crudely stitched up the open organs.

It was their most physical way of torture rather than a chemical way, though they did often inject the Wriath with drugs and chemicals like stimulants that would keep him conscious through their procedures and depressants to lower his heart rate enough that he wouldn't go into convulsions from fear, pain, and the stimulants. They had only learned the effects of those drugs and chemicals when they had blindly forced random drugs down his throat in order to see what they did, most of which made him either act like a fool or writhe around on the floor in pain for hours while the scientists stood around him observing and taking notes. As much as he hated when they did those tests, he’d much rather go through those tests than go through what they were about to do to him now.

They had already made a Y-shaped incision that cut from each shoulder and met in the middle of the Wraith’s chest and converged to just one cut that went all the way down his abdomen and ended just above his pelvis. They dug into that incision haphazardly, cutting just under the skin, and peeling back the subcutaneous muscle. They moved outwards from the incision to his sides and the base of his neck, making flaps, and lifted those flaps, exposing him completely to them. The ends of the flaps were pinned to the table to keep them in place and out of the way by what he guessed were pins, but he could only feel them, not see, due to his head being held in place by some metal hold he also couldn’t see. He could feel his organs exposed to the unsterile air, threatening to spill out, unbridled by the usual skin to hold them back, and the gloved hands that casually grabbed them and pushed them back into place whenever they slid too far. This caused blood to pour out of him at an alarming rate, his heart beating so fast out of fear that it pumped excess blood, which the ‘doctors’ just roughly wiped away every once in a while and injected him with more drugs to make his blood clot. Who knew that his own beating heart might be the death of him?

The Wraith struggled, although he knew it was useless; it wasn’t even a conscious choice anymore, just instinct, the instinct to get away, get away from the pain and the tools and the chemicals and the knives and the people intending to drive them into his insides in the name of ‘science’-

The first ‘doctor’ that came back into his view held out a hand as a gesture for him to stop.

“This will hurt less the less you resist,” she said, voice near-monotone. She had told the Wraith this many times before, and he knew it to be true. It wasn’t like resistance would help; struggling was useless anyway against these restraints and the endless amount of soldiers that were ready to move in and subdue him if he became a danger.

“Just breathe, just like I told you,” she reminded the Wraith. She had taught him breathing techniques for pain so he wouldn’t struggle and jerk away every time they made a cut in him. In fact, she seemed to be in charge of controlling him, making sure he didn’t move and disrupt the autopsies, make sure he didn’t jerk in pain and cause the other ‘doctors’ to accidentally nick something they didn’t intend to and kill him. She seemed to be the only one that paid attention to if he was in pain, the only one that paid attention to his mental state, observing how close he was to passing out and ordering and administering injections.

When the Genii first started experimenting on him, she wasn’t there, and they instead brought in several soldiers to pin him down and force him not to move. They only considered changing this after the soldiers started to get in the way of the ‘doctors’.

They probably got the idea from when a ‘doctor’ had yelled “oh shut up woul’ja?!” out of frustration at the Wraith’s struggling and screaming, and the Wraith forced himself to stop screaming out of fear. There was a long silence after that.

When they first brought her in, he had wanted nothing to do with her, despite his desperation for solace. He didn’t want to say anything to his captors besides insults and threats, though the guards had broken him well of that, and it wasn’t like they would let him speak anyway; they only let him be spoke to, as they kept the gag in his mouth; he could only communicate through nods, shakes of his head, and facial expressions.

He didn’t know whether or not he preferred to have her calming words and the humiliation of ‘willingly’ giving in or the pain and panic of being pinned down and cut into whether he liked it or not with the solace that he at least tried to stop them.

Eventually he gave in and listened to her, let her calm him down, let her talk to him. He was so worn down, had lost so much hope and will, that he had given up, but it was also out of spite for the soldiers mumbling that it wouldn’t work, that a Wraith would never respond to kindness, that Wraith only responded to force and violence; he wanted to prove them wrong. It was his own small act of rebellion and spite, his last remaining strip of defiance.

Forcing the Wraith not to move was probably safer than relying on him staying calm and keeping control when there were knives stabbing into his body, where he could easily jerk in pain while they were working on a vital organ and accidentally cripple himself, or worse, but they cared more about their work than hurting him. The fact that they cared about their work was the only reason they cared about the Wraith’s life at all, the only reason they didn’t want him dead, because he was their work, their test subject, and they apparently wanted live test subjects. To them, the Wraith was their research, just a thing they were meant to study, not a self-aware, sapient, _**person**_ that they were _**torturing**_.

But they had to have realized that he had a conscience, or else they wouldn’t have tried all this; they wouldn’t have tried having her talk to him, have her reason with him. They had to have realized that he was; they just didn’t care.

He had grown accustomed to her reminding him to breathe every time he jerked, to her shushing every time he screamed against the gag whenever the ‘doctors’ cut into a sensitive area; he knew her.

No, no that wasn’t true; he didn’t know these people; they were strangers to him. They had abducted him and taken him here to experiment on him against his will. He didn’t know this place; he didn’t know where he was other than that he was in some prison. It was a living nightmare, and he was so scared and-

“Breathe.” the first doctor reminded him.

For all that the Wraith was scared, ashamed, and vengeful, he was also just so tired. He had become so numb, so tired, so blasé to their work, to their torture, to their humiliation. His own conscious will to fight had been depleted by the repetition of their procedure, the lack of energy from the starvation, and the learned helplessness they had inculcated into him. The only energy he ever showed now to fight back was the instinctual struggle when he felt a rush of pain when they dug into him, or when they first started and he was overcome with fear. He only fought back out of pure instinct, nothing more. He had become numb, indifferent, blasé to their torture. He had become such a passive victim, such a prisoner, one who would simply take the torture without fighting back, opting to instead stare off into the distance with blank eyes, leaving the real world behind, leaving the pain, the humiliation, and the stress, all behind. Right now, he was wishing he could will himself into that mindless, blissful trance again.

The Wraith didn’t fight back anymore; it was a waste of the nutrients they constantly starved him of. There was no point; he had exhausted every option: fighting, threatening, screaming, pleading, begging; none of it worked.

The Wraith had heard humans plead to not be fed upon before. They had to have learned that from their culture. They expected sympathy and compassion because that was something they often got in their culture, so he tried that eventually, when he was so desperate and in so much pain that he abandoned his pride and allowed himself to humiliate himself by begging and pleading, but none of it worked, like how it didn’t work when the humans begged to not be fed upon.

All the defiance he had once shown them was gone; he just obeyed. Forcing himself to relax his body as much as possible, he took a deep breath in, trying to move his chest and abdomen as little as possible. Most of the breathing techniques the first doctor had taught him would not work this time, as most of them focused on moving the stomach and contracting the abdominal muscles when exhaling, and he was desperate to not move or even feel the part of him they were going to cut into this time. Most did not work well anyway, as deep breathing caused him to move more than he and the ‘doctors’ preferred. These techniques were not made for someone who was being ripped open and used as a test subject, so half of the first doctor’s job was just reminding him to breathe period, to not tense up and hold his breath to the point of making himself pass out on accident, because they also wanted him awake for some reason.

The breathing didn’t help with the pain much; it didn’t help with the pain he was currently feeling, or the excruciating pain he knew was to come, but it helped keep his mind mostly off of everything and on the breathing, which would help. He just breathed, focusing on the feeling of the air entering his nose and lungs, just the feeling, not the horribly, stuffy, not even sterile smell that filled the room. He just focused on the feeling of the air in his lungs, not the air blanketing his exposed insides, organs and bones that should never feel air.

He was so exposed, everything was so exposed, unprotected by the usual skin that covered it all. Now, the only thing standing between his internal organs and the stale and fetid air was a thin layer of blood that did little to protect him from the feeling of the relatively cold air.

It would just take one big mistake to end it all, but the ‘doctors’ never slipped up, well, at least not that much, no matter how much he was starting to wish they would. Every time they dragged him into that room he hoped he wouldn’t survive, but he always did. The one time he hated that him being a Wraith meant he was stronger than normal humans. What he wouldn’t give to be fragile and weak, to just not heal, to bleed out and get away from this place.

The ‘doctors’ tried everything they could to keep the Wraith alive during these procedures, part of their reason for holding back anesthetics, besides them just not wanting to waste the anesthetics on a creature they didn’t care how much pain was in - he didn’t know if they even had anesthetics, they wouldn’t exactly talk to him - he was the only Wraith subject they had - as far as he knew - if he died, they would have no more test subjects, at least not live ones. Who knows if they had mastered embalming and preserving dead bodies, or if they only wanted to keep him alive because they thought live experiments were more genuine - though the thought of dying and being embalmed was a chilling yet welcome thought, anything to get out of here.

The end goal of their experiments on him was to figure out how to better kill the Wraith, yet they wanted him alive. He couldn’t count the amount of times he had to be resuscitated, just a few brain-waves away from the sweet release of death, only to be forced back into his prison of a body against his will.

He stared intently at the ceiling, not at the light, and studied the pattern of rust that decorated the otherwise bland ceiling, trying to disassociate, to forget where he was and force his mind to go somewhere else, to not focus on where he was, to not focus on the people he didn’t know with intentions he didn’t know, to not focus on the knives and tools that were about to be plunged into him painfully, to simply focus all of his attention on that pattern of rust.

The room, and most, if not all, the facility, had several beams parallel to the ceiling, with lights hanging from the higher spaces in between them, giving the room dim lighting. The rust stretched across the whole ceiling, even the beams, which gave the Wraith very little confidence in the Genii’s hygiene, which was very concerning considering they were poking at his insides - no, he couldn’t think of that. He blinked, refocusing on the rust. The ceiling was scabrous with rust; it didn’t just eat away the first layers; it covered the entire ceiling and ate away so deep that the ceiling was bumpy and textured from it like a moss, almost as if the entire building was just made of rust. It made it harder to focus on a specific point and get lost in it, but he couldn’t move his head to look at anything to either side of him, and the light above him was blinding and hurt to look at directly, so he had nothing else to focus on.

Eventually, he found a part that slightly stood out from the rest - slightly was all he needed - a thin indention flowing across the ceiling for what had to be less than three inches, like a drop of water had snaked horizontally across the ceiling and eroded just that spot. He studied it, traced it up and down, outlining the outer edges and the little bumps that interrupted it’s edges, surveying the way it mildly dipped and rose like a riverbed, how the ou-

The Wraith failed his attempt to disassociate and was ripped away from his hyper-focusing as something was roughly dragged across his exposed intestines to mop up the blood coating it, eliciting a strained groan beneath his gag that he internally shunned himself for, and a jerk against the restraints. The first doctor gave him a dulcet hush, causing him to settle back down and relax as much as he could.

He calmed himself relatively down, but when he tried to refocus on the rust, a hand cupped an overflowing handful of his gut and pushed it back into place, causing another jerk, another muffled groan, and another hush, destroying all hope of focusing on anything else. His mind focused on where he was and what was happening around him, despite his best efforts.

He hadn’t realized that they were talking until now.

The ‘doctors’ had made different cuts this time. The Wraith never had a Y-shaped incision before. Before, the cuts exposed just his chest and his neck, and at one point he dimly remembers that they might have opened his head up to look at his brain, but that might have been just one of the many horrible nightmares he had suffered in this place. Now they focused on both his chest and his abdomen, and they must have found something interesting because they were chatting amongst themselves, words that he didn’t want to listen to but couldn’t help hearing.

“Why would they have that?”

“I can not answer certainly...” another ‘doctor’ answered the first. The Wraith tensed and suppressed another groan as he felt a cold metal tool consecutively poke several of his organs and push them slightly to the side, inspecting them, “though, it would make sense that they would process their _‘food’_ somehow...” the ‘doctor’ continued, expressing the word ‘food’ with sarcasm and disgust as the cold metal tool was finally pulled away, allowing its specimen to relax.

“It just looks similar to a digestive system, that might not be its function,” another ‘doctor’ stated.

“It’s too similar not to be...” one replied.

Even the first ‘doctor’ had looked away from the Wraith’s face to stare at what the other ‘doctors’ were fussing over. The Wraith grew slightly upset at that, his heart beating faster than it already was as he grew more and more agitated as the only comfort he had in this prison turned their attention away from him; he wouldn’t show it though; he refused, instead trying to shove that dependency out of his mind. He wasn’t agitated for long, as the first doctor turned her attention back to his face immediately after the sound of another batch of metal tools clinking and shuffling started, calming him slightly; that calm was short-lived however, because the most recent clatter of metal tools stopped and another ‘doctor’ spoke:

“I’m going to extract a sample.”

The Wraith tensed up again as the minute amount of calm he felt just a few seconds ago was incinerated. He hated those words; they meant that not only were they going to cut into him, they were going to take a piece of him out. Starting to struggle against the restraints again helplessly, once again desperate to escape, his heart-rate quickened again, thumping in his chest like someone pounding on a door, like it wanted out - _he_ wanted out; he wanted out; he didn’t want to go through this again-

A stream of shushes, reassurances, and reminders to breathe came from the first doctor as she hurriedly attempted to calm the Wraith. The other ‘doctors’ had paused and waited for him to calm down, or he assumed they did; he could only see maybe three of the ‘doctors’ from where his head was held, and one of the guards standing near the walls of the room, ready to move and subdue him if he became a danger; he just didn’t hear any more shuffling or movement from anything or anyone besides him and the first doctor.

He’d noticed that recently the soldiers no longer immediately rushed to pin him down to the table whenever he started struggling, and the ‘doctors’ no longer asked them to; they just waited patiently for him to calm down while the first ‘doctor’ worked to calm him down.

The Wraith tensed again in realization; that must have been why she quickly turned her attention back to him: she knew he would get scared.

They weren’t just learning his body, they were learning his mind. They had even changed parts of it, modified his behavior to their liking. They already knew what to expect from him and had built a routine around it.

He bit down on the cloth in his mouth, suddenly embarrassed that the first ‘doctor’ knew he would be afraid and had to comfort him; he was pathetic. His struggling began to die down, embarrassed and not wanting to make himself appear any weaker, even though these people had seen him at his lowest, seen him sob, heard every muffled whimper he couldn't hold back and every muffled plea for them to stop that was incomprehensible behind the gag. He couldn’t possibly go any lower... he hoped.

All his life, the Wraith had been taught to never show any form of weakness. He grew up in a volatile society constantly on the verge of war and/or starvation, where every member was required to contribute significantly to the whole in order for their species to survive. They couldn’t afford to spend precious resources on those who couldn’t pull their own weight or even those who just couldn’t perform _perfectly_. Weakness was a death sentence in his society.

The Wraith had been taught to show violence to those that mistreated him, to fight back. He’d tried to fight back; he’d tried; he’d tried so hard again and again, but it always ended the same way, with pain, punishment, and failure.

He was a commander; he commanded fleets, was in one of the highest positions among Wraith, and was typically highly respected and revered. He had been brought from the highest to the lowest point by these _humans_. Every time he begged or cried out, whether by choice or not, he was immediately consumed by humiliation and self-hatred, a feeling of worthlessness from everything his society had taught him about who he and everyone should be.

Did they even know how much they were humiliating him?

He was ashamed, but he could hardly bring himself to resist anymore. He had been conditioned, worn out, and starved to where he was blasé to it, tired, and unable to fight back no matter how much he wanted to.

There was a time when he would have berated himself for this, told himself that he should resist even if it meant more pain, for dignity’s sake. It was a voice that cut him down every time he gave in but also raised him up to resist, to kick and scream and attack his captors, to make attempt after attempt at escape; that part of that voice had died down and cowered away into a corner years ago, silent and obedient out of fear of more pain, leaving only the overwhelming shame that hurt him almost as much as their tools did. It wasn’t like resistance would help; struggling was useless anyway. Struggling was futile; resistance was futile; the more he complied the better it would be for him, the better they treated him, the less it hurt.

The Wraith stilled, stopped his straining against the restraints, and once again began to force his body to relax, giving up. He could hear shuffling around him as the ‘doctors’ resumed.

The Wraith kept telling himself several things. He kept telling himself that he would survive, like he’s told himself since the day he came in here, but for some reason that reassurance wasn’t comforting anymore, it was even starting to make him feel worse. The pain reminded him he was alive, but he really didn’t want to be. He kept telling himself that he was not afraid of pain, that pain was just the body’s natural response to damage, an alarm system to make sure that a creature would attempt to get away from whatever or cease whatever action caused the pain. He kept telling himself that he was not afraid of pain, even though the threat of it now caused him to struggle and shamelessly plead and just generally embarrass himself like the pathetic coward he had become, he kept telling himself that he was not afraid of pain. He told himself these things, then just tried to stop thinking and stared at the ceiling as he tried to find the rust pattern again.

“Cutting now.”

He should have just self-destructed.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: This was originally a flashback in a fic I haven't posted yet titled titled "Young and Foolish", before it was removed.
> 
> If it makes it any worse, I imagined the 'first doctor' to look a lot like Jennifer Keller.


End file.
